Writing Faculty, English Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.; Book Commentator, National Public Radio. Author of To Catch the Lightning: A Novel of American Dreaming;The Fires;The Light Possessed; and Listening to the Page: Adventures in Reading and Writing.

(For selected international literary prizes in 2012, see below.) English United Kingdom Much U.K. fiction in 2012 was concerned with themes of history, war, memory, and humankind’s connection with the past. Readers also witnessed a revival of high modernist experimentation and literature that resisted categorization into genres and forms. Author Hilary Mantel, who dominated headlines by becoming the first British woman to win the coveted Man Booker Prize twice, was celebrated for Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her book Wolf Hall, which won the prize in 2009. Bring Up the Bodies, the second in Mantel’s projected trilogy about Henry VIII ’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, revisited Cromwell’s role in the shattering events leading to the execution of the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. Despite its theme of Tudor reformation, many critics commented on the novel’s contemporary resonances. Thomas Penn in The Guardian newspaper found the ruthless secular Cromwell a type easy to imagine...